Crown corporations and co-operatives as coping mechanisms in regional economic development

This paper focuses attention on two types of businesses, Crown corporations and co-operatives, that have long been associated with attempted solutions to regional economic developmental problems in Canada. The paper argues that co-operatives and Crown corporations can be viewed as coping mechanisms that attempt to make up for shortcomings in Canada's market-based economic system. Consistent with this perspective, the case study of co-operatives and Crown corporations finds that, taken as a single group, these firms are more spatially dispersed than their privately held and publicly traded counterparts at both the Canadian national level and the regional level in Saskatchewan. The study also shows that, taken separately, Crown corporations are highly concentrated within Saskatchewan, while co-operatives are dispersed across the province. A possible explanation for this behaviour, warranting further research, is that Crown corporations in Saskatchewan encourage development provincially by linking with global and national business networks in their respective industries, while co-operatives in Saskatchewan largely focus on facilitating economic development opportunities at a local level across the many smaller town- and city-centred regions of the province. The paper discusses the meaning of these and other findings for regional economic development efforts in Saskatchewan and Canada.     

Whose Mandate? Policy Promises,Strong Bicameralism and Polled Opinion

The political theory of Australian politics has been dominated, since the election of a Liberal-National Party government in 1996, by claims and counterclaims about electoral mandates. The government has privileged its position in the House of Representatives; opposition parties have pointed to their support in the Senate. This paper provides a historical re-examination of the meanings and merits of mandate theories; it outlines the difficulties posed by strong bicameralism for any mandate theory; and it shows how the rise of survey research has strengthened some claims to a mandate, especially in bicameral systems, while weakening others.     

Images of Community: Discourse and Strategy in Property Relations

This article argues that divergent images of community result not from inadequate knowledge or confusion of purpose, but from the location of discourse and action in the context of specific struggles and dilemmas. It supports the view that ‘struggles over resources’ are also ‘struggles over meaning’. It demonstrates the ways in which contests over the distribution of property are articulated in terms of competing representations of community at a range of levels and sites. It suggests that, through the exercise of ‘practical political economy’, particular representations of community can be used strategically to strengthen the property claims of potentially disadvantaged groups. In the policy arena, advocates for ‘community based resource management’ have represented communities as sites of consensus and sustain-ability. Though idealized, such representations have provided a vocabulary with which to defend the rights of communities vis-à-vis states. Poor farmers, development planners, consultants and academics can also use representations of community strategically to achieve positive effects, or at least to mitigate negative ones. Most, but not all, of the illustrations in this article are drawn from Indonesia, with special reference to Central Sulawesi.     

A NOTE ON THE FORMULATION OF A FULL-ANALOGUE REGRESSION MODEL OF THE SHIFT-SHARE METHOD

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a full-analogue regression model of the deterministic shift-share method, for analyzing the components of regional employment change. The model is formulated as a constrained least squares regression problem. This leads to a direct determination of estimates for the national, industrial, and regional growth coefficients. The statistical significance of these coefficients and the overall model can then be tested by using standard regression test statistics.     

The Evaluation of Urban Public Facility Location: An Alternative to Benefit-Cost Analysis

This paper attempts to overcome some specific problems which exist with the use of benefit-cost analysis in evaluating the impact of public facilities. The concepts developed explicitly recognize the importance of the spatial distribution of impacts and the fact that tastes can differ substantially among people. By utilizing the concepts of the generalized environment and of place utility, a more general and valuable conceptual model can be developed which may be useful in preventing much current conflict over public investment decisions. The model has an explicit concern with the problem of equity and is thus only a small step in a growing field of inquiry within geography.